Psychosis
by TheInvisibleQuestion
Summary: It's been a long recovery this time around, but he's finally starting to see clearly—until his world is turned upside down again. Post-Shadow AU. Rated for safety and reference to drugs.
1. Hollow

_**Author's Note:**__ I don't own Perception. Just putting the "fan" in "fanfiction" here. This is a post-Shadow AU which preserves a bare few details from Light. __A million thanks to EnoughToTemptMe, as always, for putting up with some of my crap and not standing for the rest. __This will be the only author's note. Now, enough of my jaw waggling—on with the show!_

* * *

I don't know how many days I've been in the hospital. Two? Ten? A hundred? I can't count—they all blur together. All I can do is try to hold myself together, fight for my tenuous hold on reality, until she comes.

Kate.

She comes to visit me every day, I think, and she shakes me out of my waking nightmares. She talks with me, and I feel almost human again. I dread her leaving, but she's not mine, and other people have a claim to her, too, so eventually she returns to the world of sanity, and the nightmares return to haunt me.

My lucid moments with Kate start to become longer and clearer as the meds start to work, and the days are less blurry—I can usually tell today from three days ago, at any rate.

And then it happens. I wake up, and I know that it's a new day. I lay awake in bed for a while, waiting for the nightmares, the delusions, but they don't come. The meds are working; I don't even feel watched by the small, nondescript camera near the door. When the orderly walks in with breakfast, I recognize his face, though I can't remember his name.

"Good morning, Dr. Pierce," the orderly says, putting the tray at the end of my bed.

"Good morning," I answer. Breakfast doesn't look too bad. The oatmeal doesn't look like glue today, and the fruit is less brown than it usually is. My tea still smells funny, but there's also a cup of water.

"How are you feeling?" the orderly asks.

I smile. "Really good," I say, and I mean it. It's a new day, which means Kate hasn't come to visit yet, and today she won't have to shake me out of my delirium. I might even be able to pretend for a few minutes that I'm not totally crazy.

I take my breakfast to the window and soak in the morning sunlight. I go through four crosswords and three five-star sudoku puzzles before lunch, and after, I put aside the puzzles to watch the Cubs get slaughtered again. They're still my favorite team.

The day rolls on to four o'clock, and I start to worry. I haven't had any real sense of time until today, so maybe Kate's always been this late. She _is_ a real person with a real job, after all. I take a few deep breaths and recite the Fibonacci sequence to calm myself down.

When the orderly comes to take away the dinner dishes, I ask if Kate's supposed to come by today.

"Kate who?" the orderly asks.

Oh, God.

I can feel it—the panic—churning in my gut and clawing its way up to my chest. My fingers twitch nervously against my legs in the pattern of some piece by Chopin or Mozart or Tchaikovsky. "K-kate Moretti," I stammer. "She—she's come by every day."

The orderly shakes his head. "I'm sorry, Dr. Pierce, but you've had no visitors."

No. No, this can't be right. Kate brought me out of all my delusions. She's the singular ray of sunshine, the one good thing in my fucked-up life. "You—you must be mistaken," I say, and a nervous, panicked ha escapes right after. "She's an FBI agent. Petite. Long, brown hair." She makes me sane, I want to say, but the panic is tearing its way up my throat now and the words are shoved mercilessly aside.

"An FBI agent?" the orderly asks, and he seems incredulous. I'm sick with horror when I realize how insane it sounds for me, a paranoid schizophrenic, to be visited every day by the embodiment of the government.

I want to vomit, but more questions need to be answered before I'm _really_ horrified. "How—how many days have I been here?" I manage, all in one short breath. I'm trying to breathe deeply, but the nausea of this discovery is threatening to crush me to the ground.

"You've been here since December," the orderly says. "Six months."

"No, no, no," I say quickly, because this I _can_ remember. "I—there was a murder. Just a few days ago, may—maybe a couple of weeks." I breathe in against the nausea. "I had an—an episode, and I—I admitted myself. Not—_not_ six months." I squash the small doubt in my mind with the weight of everything I know about my condition. Even at my worst, the medication would _never_ take six months to kick in.

"There was no murder," the orderly informs me as if I'm three years old.

And then it hits me: _this_ isn't real. This realization is enough to give me a hold on myself, at least for a few minutes. I stop shaking—I didn't even realize I _was_ shaking—and the rolling storm in my stomach calms to a gently lapping tide. "Okay. I get it. I'm hallucinating _now_, and in a few minutes, Kate's going to come in and wake me up." I finally feel like I can breathe.

And then the orderly speaks again. "I'm sorry, Dr. Pierce, but there is no Kate. You've had no visitors since you came here."

No. That can't be true. This is all a hallucination, a delusion—but even as I tell myself that, I remember that I don't feel paranoid, and the meds are working. This is real.

I can't even feel the panic or the nausea any more. I just feel numb. In six months, I've had no visitors. The orderly leaves, and I walk back to my bed. I sit and curl up in a ball, resting my forehead on my knees. I know nothing but a despair so desperate it takes away everything inside me as I sob. I'm left hollow, alone, and unloved. Half a year and nobody misses me. I'm on the verge of giving up and falling back into bed when I feel a weight on the bed next to me.

I know it's her because, well, who else? "Why are you here?" I ask, and my voice comes out toneless and hollow.

She puts a hand on my shoulder, and I'm amazed I can feel anything at all, even if it's only her phantom touch. "Because you need me," she says, but I'm not sure I believe her.

"You shouldn't be here," I say. "You're not even real." I lean forward, my feet hit the floor, and I hide my tearstained face in my hands. It's not enough. I can still feel her next to me, and she feels so real, I almost can't believe she's not. She's been so faithful to me, always there when I wake up—and of course she would be.

Her hand slides down and across my back, and her arm wraps around me. I'm so surprised, I look up at her, and her gorgeous brown eyes are studying me, looking into me instead of at me.

I tear myself away, and in my mind, it sounds like heavy-duty Velcro ripping apart.

"You're not real," I repeat. My hands, now fallen from my face, fist in my quilt. "You're a hallucination, a—a dream of a reality I can never have." I know she's not real, but that doesn't stop the saner parts of me from wanting her.

It doesn't help that she runs her fingers through my hair. I think it's to reassure me, but it only makes me grip the blankets tighter. "I'm still here for you, Daniel," she says, but I don't see how that's even possible.

"Why?" I ask her—but I'm really asking myself. "Why not Natalie, or—or a _real_ Kate?" I'm not even sure there _is_ a real Kate. Is there?

"I guess today's not a good day," this imaginary Kate says. "I'll come back tomorrow, okay?" She kisses my cheek and walks out the door. I find myself quickly returning to hollowness. The imagery is strong: my body with nothing in it, just skin inflated by empty air and darkness. I fall sideways onto the bed and curl up under my covers. Maybe when I wake up, this will all have been some kind of horrible nightmare.


	2. Reality

I'm startled awake by a loud voice. I can't make out the words—they're all garbled by my sleep-addled brain, but I recognize the speaker. The door to my room flies open as I sit up, and it's Kate. The look on her face isn't curiosity or even concern; no, she's worried and terrified, and when she sees me staring back at her, I can see every muscle in her body relax in relief.

She holsters her gun—why would she have that out in the hospital?—and practically sprints to my bedside, even though it's only a few feet.

"Daniel," she breathes, and I'm starting to wonder what fucked-up scenario my imbalanced brain has concocted for me today. "You're okay," she says, wrapping her arms around me. "Oh, my God, you're okay."

I stiffen. I have no idea what's going on. "Of course I'm okay," I say. "I'm here, in the hospital."

Kate pulls back far enough to look me in the eyes, and she looks worried again.

"Why haven't you come to see me?" I ask, because the way she's behaving is making me think she might actually be real. "I've been here for so long..." It doesn't even matter how long I've been here. If this is the _real_ Kate, she should have come to see me within the first six _hours_.

"I know," she says, brushing my hair back from my forehead. I realize with some disgust that my hair is greasier than a deep-fryer. "I know you have, and I'm sorry. I'm so, _so_ sorry. I never should have let you out of my sight."

I don't understand what she's talking about now, but before I can ask, she's clinging to me like I'm going to vanish if she lets go. I can feel the contours of her face against my chest. "I thought you were dead," she whispers, and now I'm completely baffled.

"What do you mean? I've been here, in the hospital." I gesture around me, and as my eyes sweep the room, I can't help but notice it seems darker than usual.

I look back to Kate, and she's completely detached from me, save for her hands on my shoulders. "No, you haven't," she says patiently. "Look around you. _Really_ look. You're not in the hospital, Daniel, and you haven't been for a while."

I look at the room again, and it's no longer the hospital room I'm used to. The single bulb in the room casts a sickly yellow light on the room. The wallpaper, covered with what I realize are my own scribblings, is peeling and moldy. There are no windows into the hallway, and the windows to the outside world are all boarded up, except for the one I usually sit at, which is caked with dust and cobwebs. I stand up, trying to take stock of my room. The carpets, which might have been cream or beige or white at one point, are shabby and spotted with various stains and burns. The bed is rusting and rickety, and the night table has lost almost all of its paint. In my closet, which has lost both of its doors, the clothes on the hangers aren't clean pajamas, but sweat-stained t-shirts and filthy sweatpants. I look down at my own clothes; my shirt and sweatpants are stained with God knows what, and my plaid bathrobe is thin from wear and torn in more than a few places. I walk back to the bed, which is probably crawling with bugs and is covered with a tattered quilt that is a far cry from its hallucinatory counterpart. I can smell myself, and I need a shower and clean clothes, but more importantly, I need to know what the hell is going on. "Where am I?" I ask Kate, who's standing at the foot of the bed now, watching me.

She stands totally still as she recites the facts to me, like it's a case, trying to distance herself from her emotions long enough to get all the words out. "You're in an abandoned motel room in Elburn, forty miles west of Chicago. You've been here for three weeks and four days, and I am so sorry it took me so long to find you." Her voice breaks near the end, and her tears glitter in the dim light, but she doesn't flinch.

I don't believe it. "No," I argue. "No—_no_! There was a—a _murder_, and I was _admitted_ and—and you came to see me, and—" I freeze. I can't remember anything after that. A vague memory feebly tries to assert itself of Kate standing next to me, and of Natalie in a doctor's coat, and of me walking out, but it's fuzzy and weak, and I'm not sure which memory is real.

"Yes," Kate says. "There was a murder. You were admitted. I came to see you. We investigated." A shining tear falls down her face, but her voice is still steady. "We got too close. I thought they'd killed you, but we couldn't find your body, so I—I had to hope you lived." Her voice breaks once, and the last part comes out as a whisper. Another tear falls to punctuate her words.

"No. No, that can't be right!" I tug at my hair, pacing around the dingy room in my tattered robe and my bare feet. I don't know what's real, and it's frustrating. And then I have an idea. "Backup," I say. "Where's your backup?"

Kate laughs nervously and wipes her eyes with her fingers. "In the hallway," she says. "I made them wait outside so you wouldn't be overwhelmed."

I walk to the door and poke my head out. Half a dozen armored guys with guns are standing ready in the hall, led by Roger Probert. He gives me a cheeky grin, but I can see the relief in his posture, too. I turn back to Kate, and even though it's not a great situation, I want it to be the real one.

I walk over to the dirt-encrusted window and look outside. There are some smudgy black shapes in the alley below, and I'm pretty sure they're police cars.

I hear Kate walk over to me, and her hand rests gently on my arm. "Come on," she says quietly. "Let's get you home."

I turn toward her, and I don't know if she's wearing heels, or if I've somehow gotten shorter, but she seems a lot closer to my height now. It's all too easy for me to just lean down a couple of inches, to press my lips against hers—and then I do. I'm startled, first by my own audacity, and second by her hands, tangled in my greasy hair. I put my arms around her and pull her closer, amazed and emboldened by the fact that she doesn't seem to care that I haven't showered in God knows how long. I break away from her when I realize I still have to breathe, and her hands, slightly greasy from my hair, hold my face where it is for a moment. I brush her face with my fingers, and for a moment we're just staring in awe of each other.

"Ohh-kay, you lovebirds," Probert says from the doorway. "We don't have all day."

Kate and I both blush, and she drags me by the arm to the door. I'm pretty sure I can hear Probert stifling sniggers behind us as Kate leads me down the stairs. I'm afraid to stink up her car, but she insists it's the only way I'm getting home to a shower. We compromise by rolling both passenger-side windows down and turning the fan on high. This seat is going to smell like greasy, filthy, middle-aged madman for the rest of its life, I'm sure, but we make it home, and Max is waiting with a change of clothes and a cup of good tea.


	3. Home

"Doc!" Max exclaims when I walk in the door. He looks tired, but relieved. It's been a long month for him, too, I guess. He wrinkles his nose when he comes near me. "Shower first, hug later," he says in his usual no-nonsense tone.

Kate promises she'll still be here when I'm cleaned up—she'd better be, after _that_ kiss—so I take my cup of tea upstairs and strip off my filthy clothes. I consider putting them in the hamper, but it would take half a dozen washes to clean them, and they probably wouldn't survive anyway, so I put the robe, t-shirt, sweatpants, and underwear into the trash. The water is probably the second most heavenly thing that's happened to me all day, and I try not to look at how dark the water is as it flows down the drain. I do four full washes, and two extra on my hair. The skin on my arms is pink when I get out and towel off, and I'm shedding like a dog. After I get into my clean clothes and trim off the beard I've acquired in the last few weeks, I sit for a minute in the steamed-up bathroom and just breathe.

I'm almost human when I go downstairs, and Max greets me with an actual hug this time before he takes my half-full, stone-cold cup of tea into the kitchen. Kate makes a joke about me cleaning up nicely, even though I'm in a Cubs t-shirt and a pair of sweats. She starts to guide me into the kitchen, and I have to remind her that I _do_ know my way around my own house. Max hands me a hot cup of tea and makes me sit down at the table. He makes Kate sit, too, and then he brings over a casserole of some kind and we dish up. It's good, whatever it is—I think it involves lots of vegetables and maybe some pasta—but now that I'm calmed down, I'm starting to wonder what _actually_ happened—if this isn't another delusion.

"Kate?" I ask.

She's already looking at me, has been for a few minutes. Max has been studying his plate, knowing I'll feel uncomfortable if they're both staring at me. "Yeah," she responds, and out of the corner of my eye, I see Max look up at her.

"What happened?"

Kate looks down at her plate, suddenly intent on her casserole. "You, uh, you were kidnapped. Or, you know, Daniel-napped."

It's a terrible joke, and nobody—not even Kate—finds it amusing. I just need to know what happened, so I have some correct version of reality to push away the incorrect ones. "No, before that," I say.

"Where do you want me to start?" she asks.

I'm not even sure. I try to think back to what I can remember. "There was a murder," I say. "But it wasn't real."

"It _was_ real," Kate says, and I'm confused. It must show on my face, because she takes a deep breath and plunges in right where my memory leaves off. "You called me and said you'd witnessed a murder, but there was no evidence at all. I took you home, and didn't see you for two days. You were alone in the house, and when I came back, Max was just shaking you out of—of an episode. You asked Max and I to take you to the hospital, and you checked yourself in. A few days later, you checked yourself out. They said you'd gone to find me, but I hadn't seen you. I'd been trying to solve the case after I'd found out that there _was_ a Wesley Sumpter who had been murdered. I looked everywhere for you. Our murder investigation turned into a missing persons case, and for three weeks we had no leads.

"We got a tip a couple of days ago from someone about a man in the abandoned building across the alley, but we couldn't trace the call. So we started looking for abandoned buildings in Chicago. All the ones still standing got a once-over, but they were all empty. We got another tip this morning, this one about a couple of suspicious persons outside an abandoned building in Elburn. They were gone when we got there, but you were still there—and you were alive." Kate looks like she's going to cry, and Max is staring holes into his plate. It's a nice recount, but she's left out the important part.

"What happened to _me_?" I ask. I was out of my mind for weeks, and that's not something I can forget.

Kate shakes her head. "I don't know. Unit found some stuff in the lobby. Probert's trying to piece it together. So far, it looks like they gave you something to make you delirious, but they must have stopped giving it to you, because you seem pretty sane to me."

"What did they find?" I ask. I know I can put it together faster than any of those office monkeys.

"Daniel..." Kate warns. Max is getting uneasy—I can tell by the rate his legs are jittering.

"I need to know what they did to me!" I shout, because no one is hearing what I'm saying. I won't have any rest until I know what kept me out of my mind for three and a half weeks. Why can't anyone understand that?

Kate puts a hand on my arm. "Finish your casserole," she says. "Then you can get dressed and I'll take you to the precinct."


	4. Solution

When Max takes my plate, I realize that they both need to know what happened to me, too. I go upstairs and find jeans. My trusty briefcase is sitting on my bed, where I left it all those weeks ago. I put on a plaid shirt over my t-shirt and leave the buttons undone. I find a pair of shoes and socks, and they feel weird on my feet. After a quick look in the mirror to make sure I don't look too crazy, I take my briefcase and meet Kate downstairs. Max is in the kitchen, up to his elbows in soap, but he looks pretty content to be doing the dishes. He waves with a sudsy hand, and I follow Kate out to the car.

I'm starting to notice now that she's constantly looking at me. I think it might be because I've been gone for so long, but it's starting to make my skin crawl, being watched like this. That, and she's going to have to keep her eyes on the road. She starts the car and glances at me. Her hand rests on the gearshift, and I open my mouth to speak. It takes too long for me to find the right words, and she shifts the car into drive. Her hand is still on the gearshift, and mine gravitates toward hers. The car still hasn't moved, so I slip my hand, palm-up, beneath hers, and lace our fingers. She looks at our hands, then at me. I nod to the windshield. "Eyes on the road," I tell her, and she nods. She pulls out into the road and drives all the way to the precinct with one hand. She only looks at me once, the entire time, and that's while we're stopped at a red light.

We get to the building, and I have to go through the pat-down, but it's a guard who knows me, and I'm done in record time. We go up—Kate holds my hand in the elevator—and I'm startled by the raucous cheers when the doors open. I nod and wave nervously—have there always been this many people up here?—and I'm about to run screaming the other way when Kate takes my arm and pulls me through the crowd to an observation room, where the table holds some stuff arranged in numbered groups.

"Is this it?" I ask her once I've caught my breath. There's an extra, smaller table near the door, and there I drop my briefcase.

"This is it." She hands me a pair of gloves and the blue nitrile offers a satisfying _snap_ on each hand. I start near the door, where an army of medicine bottles is congregated next to a plastic number 1. The labels on the bottles are hand-written, but I recognize almost all of them, and I'm horrified to think I ingested _any_ of these. Most are recreational drugs, made into the form of pills. There's cannabis, mescaline, three different amphetamines, four different doses of caffeine—there's a reason I stay away from coffee—and a dozen more. A few are legitimate medications, like dopamine stimulators—helpful for a patient with depression, hell on me.

I set the bottles down and move on before I make myself sick wondering which ones they used. There's a pile of clothes next to the number 2 card. Some are filthy shirts and pants I wore, some are scrubs in the same teal as the orderly whose name I still can't remember. There's a fake name badge attached to one of the scrub shirts, and I know it's fake because even though it's got the orderly's face on it, the name is a random string of letters, capitalized to resemble a name. My mind tries to work out what it means, if the letters anagram to anything, but I move on before I get too absorbed.

There is an array of cassette tapes in group number 3, the kind you'd buy blank and record onto. I look up at Kate. She's standing to the side, letting me work. "Do you have a cassette player?" I ask. Kate picks up a clunky thing from the nineties and hands it to me. I put in the tape, and press play. I think maybe the tape is blank when I hear faint noises. It takes a minute before I understand it's a recording of a hospital. I can hear a cough from the next room, footsteps, the indistinct chatter of doctors and nurses. In my mind, I can see my motel-hospital room—the imagined one—and it's subtle, but this tape reminds me strongly of it. I stop the tape and look back at the scrubs, the fake name badge, the meds. The pieces fall together in my mind.

"They didn't just stop the drugs," I say aloud. Kate's immediately interested, and I don't wait for her to prompt me.

I pick up one of the bottles. "These are all recreational drugs and stimulants. In a normal person, the effects are relatively harmless: a few hallucinations, less drowsiness, lower depression. In a schizophrenic—" and I laugh, just once, because it's actually kind of ingenious "—they induce psychosis. Even a little bit of LSD or extacy or cannabis would induce one hell of an episode." I shudder to think which ones they did actually give me. "So. They drug me up. I'm totally out of it. Conscious, but completely deluded. Then—" and here I put down the bottle and pick up the scrubs "—they put on a sort of skeleton performance of hospital life. I've been in the hospital before, so I know what to expect, and as long as they don't disrupt my expectations too badly, my mind will supply the rest: the sunshine, the windows, the Cubs games." I don't mention the visitor. "They didn't just cut off the psychotics. They _weaned_ me off." It makes sense now, those increasingly lucid periods. I'm satisfied that I've solved this puzzle, although I'm worried the drugs are still in my system.

Kate doesn't look as satisfied, judging by the creases between her eyebrows. "If they did all that," she says, "they'd have to be pretty familiar with your history." I nod, but if Reardon could run a background check and find out I was at Rexford, it wouldn't be hard for someone else to do the same. She looks like she's about to make a mental breakthrough when she shakes her head. "I'll work on it tomorrow," she says. "It's been a long day." She strips off her gloves and tosses them in the can by the door. I peel mine off—they're much tighter on my hands, and I lose a few hairs in the process—and grab my briefcase on the way out.

"But you haven't even solved the case," I protest, though I'm feeling worn out as well, and I'm starting to really worry about the anti-meds. I'm considering checking into the _real_ hospital for a few days, just to be safe.

She stops at her desk for her briefcase and her jacket. "We know who kidnapped you, Daniel, and we're working on finding them, but there's nothing else I can do right now." She sounds tired, and I remember she's probably been working God knows how long, searching through abandoned buildings to find me—and that's not even counting the last three and a half weeks.

I grip my briefcase tightly. "Okay," I say, and I follow her to the elevator. I hold my briefcase and silently recite the rows of Pascal's triangle until we get out on the parking level. We don't talk on the way home, but she looks at me every chance she gets, and after a couple of stoplights, I take her hand again so she'll focus on the road. She parks in front of my house, but she doesn't make any move to get out of the car. "A-are you going home?" I ask. It's selfish, I know, but I don't want her to go.

"I need to sleep," she says.

"You could sleep with me." The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. My face turns red and I'm quick to correct myself. "No! I mean—stay! You could stay with me."

She hesitates and I know she's thinking about making some excuse about pajamas or sleeping arrangements.

"You can borrow pajamas, and I'll sleep on the couch."

"You don't have to—"

"I want to," I say, cutting her off. "I don't—I don't want to be alone," I add quietly. It's the weakest excuse I've made all day. Max is there; I won't be alone.

She stares at me for a moment, and I think she's going to argue some more. She doesn't. Instead, she sighs and takes the keys out of the ignition.


	5. Rest

We go inside, and Max pokes his head out of his room and says hello before disappearing again. I flick the TV on and sit on the couch, but the Cubs game is almost over, and there's not much else I want to watch. Kate settles on the other end of the sofa and pretends she's not looking at me.

"Are you okay?" I ask, because I don't know what's going through her mind, and this is the easiest way I know how to ask.

There's a pause, and then she gives me a tired smile. "I'm just tired," she says. "Been a long day."

"Long month," I correct; I'm tired and I don't have the burden of time. Three weeks or three days, it would have been pretty much the same to me.

Kate nods.

I get up and head for the stairs. "Let me get you a shirt; I'll be right back." I go up to my bedroom and dig through my drawers for a clean shirt and a pair of drawstring sweats. I pick up the dirty laundry from the floor and toss it at the hamper, too, and then I go back downstairs. Kate has shifted, slumped against the couch cushions. She looks half-asleep, but she wakes up when she hears my footsteps. "These okay?" I ask, and she smiles.

She comes out of the bathroom ten minutes later, and I wonder if she fell asleep mid-change. "How do I look?" she asks, and that's definitely the wrong question, because the way she looks in my t-shirt and sweatpants gives my whole body a reaction that is usually reserved for lovesick teenagers and hormonal college students.

It takes me at least seven seconds to find my voice. "You look tired," I say, and of course it's not at all what I meant, but it's already out there.

She shrugs and sets her neatly-folded work clothes on top of her shoes by the door. It's a bit awkward now, because she's in her pajamas—well, my pajamas, actually—and I'm still in my jeans. "Come on," I say, and she follows me up the stairs. I convince her to sit on the bed while I change into the sweatpants I was wearing earlier, and then I join her. She's watching me intently, and I wonder if she thinks I'm going to vanish in the night, or in the next five minutes, if she stops watching.

That's not all I'm wondering, though, because she's sitting in front of me wearing my pajamas and staring at me and I know _I_ certainly can't stop thinking about kissing her. I might be crazy in the head, but the rest of me is pretty sane, and I'm not really surprised at my reaction to her closeness. Right now, I want to hold her hand and kiss her, but I'm terrified she's going to push me away.

Her expression changes, and it's the look that immediately precedes a question. I shy away instinctively. "Can I ask you something?" It's the most ridiculous question I've ever heard. "You can say no if you want."

I'm not stupid enough to answer without knowing the question, but I do nod.

"Can I, uh, stay here?" she asks.

"Uh, you mean—?" I prompt, hopeful.

"Never mind." She shakes her head, staring at her fingers in her lap. "It's okay—I can sleep on the couch."

"No," I say, and she looks up at me. I kiss her—her request has given back my courage. It's short and soft, but she returns it, and when it's over, I warn her, "No funny business." It's mostly a joke, since we're both too tired to do anything but sleep like the dead.

Kate smirks, and I reach out and touch her face. "I missed you," I say. I don't even realize until the words are out that I did miss her. I missed her so much that I imagined her visiting me, making me sane again.

Her smirk turns to a genuine smile, and she says, "I missed you, too." She leans forward and kisses my cheek. I stand up and go around to the other side of the bed. Kate lays down on top of the covers and I follow suit.

"You visited me," I say when we're settled down. She's got both hands under her head, and I'm propped on one elbow. "I would come back to myself, out of the nightmares and the confusion and the delirium, and you'd be there. You talked to me, kept me sane until the meds kicked in again."

Kate inches closer to me, and I reach out and take her hand. "You shouldn't have needed an imaginary Kate," she says. "I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault," I say firmly.

"But what if they'd done something to you? Hurt you? _Killed_ you? What would I do then?"

"I'm right here," I tell her. "I'm alive, I'm not hurt, and I'm not completely out of my mind."

Kate smiles a little, and then a yawn escapes. She covers her mouth with the hand that's not in mine, and I reach back to turn off the lamp. She falls asleep in minutes, but I lie awake a while longer, listening to the sound of her breathing, and my own.

I wake in the wee hours of the morning and she's moved in her sleep—and maybe I have, too—until she's curled up against me. She's laying on my arm, cutting off the feeling in my fingers, and I extract myself before I drift off again.

When I wake up in the morning, she's not there, and I curl up into myself, cursing this madness that gives me Kates and takes them away—and then the bathroom door opens and she crawls back onto the bed.

I know I need to get up and go to the hospital, make sure whatever the bastards gave me isn't doing any real damage, but I'm content for the moment where I am.


End file.
